I ran the numbers on what I actually spend in a year and I think I've been lying to myself for a while
I want to be upfront that this is more of a personal reckoning post than a milestone post. No impressive numbers here, just someone who thought they had a handle on their spending and then actually checked.
I've been loosely following FIRE principles for about two years. Maxing my Roth IRA, contributing enough to get my employer match on the 401k, putting a bit into a taxable brokerage most months. I felt pretty good about it. I had a general sense that I was spending "around $2,800 a month" on living expenses, which over a year is about $33,600. That number felt reasonable for my city, not frugal but not crazy.
Last week I actually went through every transaction for the past 12 months. Not a vibe check, not a rough estimate, every single line item. The real number was $41,200. That's almost $7,600 more than I thought. I sat with that for a while.
The gap wasn't one big thing. It was a lot of small things I wasn't mentally categorizing as spending. Subscriptions I'd forgotten about, maybe $60-70 a month in stuff that just auto-renewed without me noticing. A habit of buying one thing online whenever I was stressed that I'd never added up. Flights and travel that I thought of as "occasional" but apparently averaged out to more than I realized. A gap between what I thought I spent on food and what I actually spent on food that was honestly a little embarrassing.
The math on this is annoying. At my current savings rate I was operating on assumptions that were about 22% off from reality. That affects how I think about my timeline, how I think about what I actually need saved, all of it. I'm not panicking, the investments are still going in, but I'm recalibrating my assumptions from scratch. If anyone else here has never done a full 12 month transaction audit and just operates on a gut estimate, I'd gently suggest actually running the numbers. Mine were more wrong than I expected.